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After having now served as the member of Parliament for Kings­ton and the Islands for just over a year and a half, Ted Hsu is looking forward to 2013.

On the horizon, Hsu said, there are a number of exciting things coming, beginning with the introduction of the 2013 budget.

“The 2013 budget will come out (at the) end of February/beginning of March, and this last year there were a lot of changes that came out, not only in the budget but in the budget implementation bill,” Hsu said.

“It was the first of two omnibus bills in 2012, and so it seems that a lot of the big changes that the federal government wants to make go into these budget bills. So we’ll be looking at what’s in the budget.”

Hsu serves as the Liberal critic for science and technology, as well as sitting on the Liberal shadow cabinet for the Federal Economic Development Agency of Southern and Northern Ontario. This has allowed Hsu to learn all about another issue that will continue to affect all Canadians, he said.

“The federal government’s debt has gone up quite a bit, probably about 25% in the last three years. It’s over about $600 billion of debt,” he said.

“So it’s pretty big, and what it means is that the government has decided that it has to cut services and other programs, and it’s going to be a constant pull, back and forth, between how quickly you want to cut down debt and what you want to cut in terms of services and programs and how does that affect people.”

Hsu said the local riding has already seen some of these cuts, which began this year. He pointed to cuts in citizenship and immigration and those that have been ongoing at the Royal Military College for most of 2012. Despite cuts being made to military services, however, Hsu said Canadian Forces Base Kingston has maintained job stability.

For Hsu, the cuts to programs and services that are still yet to come are things he plans to keep an eye on.

“We’ll just be keeping track of all the changes, cuts to this and cuts to that,” he said of himself and his party. “We’ll be keeping tabs on the government to try to make sure that whatever cuts they make are done carefully and are really needed.”

With these cuts, Hsu said he has noticed a couple of things that have changed over the past year. His constituency office is seeing a marked increase in people coming in for guidance since the closing of Kingston’s Citizenship and Immigration office in October, he explained.

And, as social service jobs get cut, it is getting harder and harder to actually speak to a human on the phone about service issues or concerns.

“There’s a price to be paid for cutting services — there isn’t a whole lot of fat,” he said with a laugh. “People really rely on services and, with the citizenship and immigration office closing and other services, it’s really, really hard to talk to somebody face to face, so that’s one of the things that have been cut — face-to-face contact.

“So a lot of people come to my office because my office is where you get face-to-face contact with somebody that’s connected to the federal government.”

Other things to which Hsu said he is looking forward in 2013 include the Liberal party joining the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. Together, the two groups will be lobbying the federal government to ask that the federal gas tax be adjusted for inflation. The money from this tax, he said, goes back into the municipalities for infrastructure.

“It will mean a slow, steady increase of money for infrastructure dollars to compensate for inflation.

“Actually, one of the city’s priorities is capital investment into (the Point Pleasant) water plant,” Hsu said, referring to the water purification plant in Kingston’s west end whose recent troubles resulted in residents being asked to conserve water.

“With more infrastructure dollars coming in, we wouldn’t have to worry quite so much about clean water out west (in Kings­ton),” he said. “Those are the sorts of things that we’re hoping, across the country, will get paid for if we increase the federal gas tax money that goes to infrastructure.”

Throughout 2012, Hsu said, he has learned a lot about Correctional Service Canada, and about engaging people through social media. Engagement of the people, he said, is something he plans to encourage more in 2013 — in both directions.

Hsu said he wants to continue to allow people to have a voice in what goes on at the federal level, as well as keeping them abreast of happenings on Parliament Hill. The latter, he said, he is doing both on social media, such as Twitter and YouTube, and through his show on Cogeco TV, which is filmed once a month.

And, looking ahead, Hsu said he has a few things planned that he’ll be doing to help Kingstonians and Canadians in general.

“I have some ideas on how to improve how parliament works,” Hsu said, teasing as to what he has in store for 2013.

“I won’t tell you what it is right now, but I have some things that I am going to be tabling that I think I could get some broad support on that might make parliament work a bit better.”

And, all the while, Hsu plans to work on maintaining a presence and comfortable agenda with his family.

“I want to make sure that they’re happy,” he said. “I am away four or five days a week when the house is sitting, so it’s good to have a schedule and a rhythm and make sure that they’re taken care of.”